Quote:
Originally Posted by wittynickname
But there are millions of Americans who are not so lucky. There are people who can be discriminated against for housing, for jobs, if Pence and his ilk have their way. It will change life as they know it. I really am just asking you to stop acting as if these are minor concerns because they are not.
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First, I'm not making any comment about your social standing or circumstances (or "privilege" or whatever you want to call it), because I don't know you and I would never presume to make those kinds of judgments. I'm talking about your ideas as you've expressed them and as I'm understanding them from reading them, and it's clear that your view of the world is guided by identity politics, as you've expressed. I strongly reject that mode of thinking, and as corporatejay said earlier in the thread (although a bit tongue-in-cheek), "that's going to cost you a second term". But that's more of an annoyance than anything, I don't want to be taken as dismissing the substance of your concerns because of my dislike of the way you express them or the lens you view them through.
I really want to stress that I'm
not acting as if they're minor concerns. I'm not "writing them off" at all. They are
huge concerns. Human suffering of any kind, particularly to disadvantaged groups, is something under normal circumstances that we should go to almost any lengths to oppose. These are not normal circumstances. I think the problem is that I'm not getting across how insanely bad the other alternative can, quite conceivably, be. It's not that the terrible things you're describing are being put on one side of the scales and not weighing heavily for me, it's that what's on the other side of the scales
still manages to dwarf those terrible things. It's hard to fathom, so I hope I can be cut a little slack if I'm not effectively communicating here.
I don't remember who said it right after the election, but it was someone speaking in the context of environmental issues, talking about sheer scale of the potential ramifications from Trump's environmental policies and his general view that climate change is a Chinese hoax. It was, "you can't get an abortion underwater". That's the kind of stakes we're talking about here.